ID cards are great... if you want to spit on liberty and be a serf
HERE they come again, waving identity cards. The people who wrecked Britain in the first place now want to make it even worse. Having flung our borders wide to anyone who cared to wander in, they want to use this as an excuse to introduce identity cards.
Former Labour Home Secretary Alan Johnson, and the incessant Blairite cheerleader and Times columnist David Aaronovitch, are noisily trying to dig up this grisly political corpse.
But Mr Aaronovitch spoiled things a bit by admitting that such a move would have to come ‘in tandem with an amnesty’.
He is right. Even on its own terms, the scheme is far too late to solve the migration crisis. Millions of new people are already here, many hundreds of thousands quite illegally, and no conceivable British government would ever try to remove them all.
It can cope with a few symbolic expulsions, to make itself look tough. But can you imagine what would happen if it attempted a mass round-up of everyone who has ever climbed out of the back of a lorry and vanished into the dusk? I can. It would explode in their faces.
The unintended consequence of mass registration will, in reality, be – as Mr Aaronovitch rightly says – an official amnesty for illegal migrants.
In which case it will be difficult to object to a future amnesty for the next lot of illegals who arrive, once there are so many of them here that it becomes an issue. So, if identity cards don’t actually solve that problem, what do we have left? A threat to your liberty and mine.
These Blairites come from a broadly Marxist tradition (which I suspect Mr Aaronovitch understands better than Mr Johnson), so they have nothing much against centralised state power over the individual.
Mr Johnson is a nicer man who can be forgiven much because of his beautiful and moving memoir of his childhood, This Boy. But he shouldn’t be let off when he gets things wrong.
The other evening, at a celebration of the genius of the great writer and Briton George Orwell, Mr Johnson told me (in his usual charming way) that he thought he might have persuaded Orwell to endorse our regime of CCTV cameras, surveillance of emails and increased police powers.
I do not think so. In his greatest work, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell warned quite specifically against a nightmare world of hidden cameras and microphones, and arbitrary rule, much of it excused by a supposed external threat from an ever-changing enemy. I reread it often in case I forget this warning. I am confident he would have recognised in present-day Britain the hardening outlines of an oppressive surveillance state in which the individual is powerless.
One of the keys to its operation will be identity cards. That is their real point. They were quite useless for any of their claimed purposes when we last had them between 1939 and 1952. I can find no instance of any spy or fifth-columnist having been caught through their use in that period.
But hundreds of busybodies and petty tyrants used them to make life difficult for innocent individuals going about their lawful business.
One of my favourite stories about this era concerns one British Jew, Myer Rubinstein, who decided not to register. I assume he did so because he very wisely thought that, if a Nazi invasion ever came, registration would mean certain death for him, as the identity registers of so many other European countries had meant death for so many other Jews. He went undetected without such a card, throughout the Second World War and for many years afterwards.
AS FOR the supposed use of such cards in ‘establishing your identity’, this spectacularly did not prove to be the case for Charles Jarman, leader of the Seamen’s Union who, in 1945, was ludicrously arrested on suspicion of having led a smash-and-grab raid.
Police held him for hours despite his identity card showing ‘who he was’. This sort of thing led, thanks to the fury and persistence of a single High Court judge, to the abolition of these useless, oppressive, breathing licences. Actually, such cards prove nothing, except that the State has issued them. Very few criminal cases or frauds are about the identity of the culprit. Terrorists, we may be sure, will have the very best and most convincing identity cards of all.
But if we submit to them, we will all have lost something vital. For centuries, in the English-speaking countries, the State and its officers have had to identify themselves to us, rather than the other way round.
This is the right relationship between citizen and government. It is like the presumption of innocence and jury trial, a practical and vital proof that we are free men and women. To accept identity cards would be to turn our whole free constitution upside down, and place the State above our heads rather than under our feet, where it belongs.
If we do this, we will take a huge step back towards being serfs. And we will be spitting on the inheritance of liberty our parents handed on to us, and betraying our children and grandchildren. Don’t let these smooth voices fool you.
MANY congratulations to the BBC, for once, for going to the Iraqi city of Mosul and investigating the terrible toll of innocent civilian casualties there during the West’s attack on Islamic State. Much of our moralising about Syria would have to stop if we admitted how brutal our Iraqi intervention had been.